Cowboys and Indians

It's always impressed me that Bill Eastlake was born in Brooklyn, just that he's so particularly and adamantly Western, however vague now that term becomes. Much like Edward Abbey, with whom I first went down from Taos to meet him in the mid '50s, that wonder of an imagined place had somehow met with its actuation in fact, and the intensive demand both men bring to anywhere they are, being Easterners I'd like to say, got response in this otherwise gritty, barren, wind-blasted, inhuman, godforsaken and altogether dear desert, the so-called Southwest. As it happened, I had written Bill his first fan letter, from Mallorca, having read a story of his, "Little Joe," in Accent (Autumn 1954). I was trying to get active prose for the Black Mountain Review , and his writing, with its asperity and singular (almost 'existential') point of view, call it, caught me instantly. This story, be it said, was far from the setting of his subsequent writing, involved as it was with children and their teasing of a bigger one, "Little Joe," who is retarded—and a tree they variously climb, which still sticks in memory as a wondrous, literal center. Bill took my letter as some signal of international recognition, which thankfully and deservedly he did finally get but not that year. I, in turn, never did have a chance to publish him in the magazine because it collapsed very shortly after. It wasn't till Donald Allen invited me to collaborate with him on the editing of New American Story (1965) that that could happen in any respect.

The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3, no. 1 (Spring 1983).

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At the back of that book are printed brief statements by the writers included (Ed Dorn, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Michael Rumaker, and Jack Kerouac among them). What Bill says is writ large but its legitimate emphasis becomes, if anything, more clear in the years since:

Someone has got to believe in a future. Someone has got to give us a religion we can go by, and the truth is defeatist. Only the artist can give us the emotional ecstasy, the defiance in face of facts, the joy of life that will make us conquer ourselves and go into the future, a future as bright as a mirror and colored with all the imagination of the young. If there is no future then the artist will make one. It is the unique ability of man and the supreme triumph of the artist. The artist is the best in us all. He is the true creator and art is the only religion worthy of man.

These are not the sentiments of a postmodernist; that is, such regal hopes or measures for human potential would find no place in that disposition. But as he says, in this same note, " . . . writers never grow up. The artist is forever a child, a child in that he has that first wonder for the world." In other words, this is not a situation of world intellectually disposed, however intelligent participation in it may be or recognition of its nature may prove. It is a vision, a dream, we variously recognize, so that Bill is, if anything, a very old-style writer indeed, a storyteller who knows that the wonder is the telling, always was, always will be, and that it is only by such apparently discursive address to it all that anything, of anyone, anywhere, anytime, will ever get said. I.e., you don't know it. You are it. So tell it like it is . . .

I think I can say fairly his heroes were Faulkner and Hemingway. I know he greatly respects them and put himself to their texts as measure of his own. He strikes me as a Hemingway with a sense of humor, a Faulkner with wider, more complexly simple space to move in. Or something to that effect. Comparisons are truly odious, if there's to be no factual engagement of terms—and that one can most simply manage for oneself, i.e., read all three. The cowboys and Indians of Go in Beauty (1956), The Bronc People (1958), and Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses seem a perfect métier for his information of that world he both proposes in imagination and also daily lives in, as objectively determined fact. That dryness, that fact of the specific thing to be dealt with, that vast roominess the displacement of an inch might well crowd, a time without seam or accessibility, and person, often, a furious small Stephen Crane-like

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dot in the sand—this is neither human place nor time to be thought through and therefore settled, once and for all. Insofar as humans propose to deal with this world, consciously, they will forever be perversely separated from it, balanced on its edge, at best, looking in. So it is one of his charming Indians can truly say, well, at least I didn't go to Yale . . . . And anyone with any wit at all must forever hanker to be in The Bronc People 's incredible white convertible as it leaves the so-called road and plunges straight out into the river—and on, by god, still going!

There's a part of Bill that will always be hooked on teasing, on poking his finger through the obvious hole. I recall an evening he spent largely questioning Joseph Wood Krutch as to how he could have spent a life devoted to an author as inhumanly dull as the one who wrote Rasselas . I think he even expected an answer, though I don't think he got one. Likewise he put much the same effort into catechizing kids of an intensely Catholic family as to what might be their sense of it all. He is merciless in these preoccupations. Another time, when we were visiting again, he sent Ed Abbey out into a veritable blizzard (so it proved) to check the horses in a pasture some distance from the house. After some time Ed did finally make it back, but as he would tell you, it hadn't been easy in the blowing snow. He told Bill he'd come very close to x-ing one of the horses, slitting its belly and crawling inside—an old survival tactic that Bill didn't take to at all, at least not that night with, proposedly, one of his dear horses the sacrificial victim.

Both Bill and his wife have been so specifically good to me and mine over the years I can't end any such note as this without particular instance. For example, when we'd come back from Guatemala the early summer of 1960, they contrived to get us use of her brother-in-law's place, an old institutional conference house up in the mountains above Cuba, and so we could relax and regroup sans the awful dilemmas of no place to live with four kids and no money. I had an oddly persistent wheeze that summer, accompanied by a low but tenacious fever. The prognosis was bleak, i.e., either lung cancer or tuberculosis (which last meant I'd lose the prospective employment at U.N.M., if I did in fact have it). I was supposed to take it as easy as possible, but Bill, thank god, had other plans. He showed up one day to roust me out for a ride up to the high mesa of those mountains which go all the way east to Santa Fe. Once up and out, I found the world becoming a wondrous place as we rode higher and higher, threading through the oak brush, meeting with Indians trailing horses, spotting the occasional old-time home-

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steader who might well have got there before the territory had become the present New Mexico (1912?). Then we came into the meadows, with creeks and knee-high grass, and miles and miles of open sky and mesa. No wonder he has spent so long in its spell, and has so adamantly insisted upon its measure as against the tediously convenient and small fact of this or that passing appetite. This world, at least in mind, will forever be before and after all others. It is the one, so to speak.

Finally we were coming back down and Bill's horse, a wildly good-natured but dead-mouthed quarterhorse, Poco Mas, managed to lodge Bill and himself smack up against a barbed wire fence, so that Bill's left wrist was caught between the pommel of the saddle and the wire. I managed to back the horse off without problem and then wound a bandana I characteristically had with me in those days tightly around his wrist. Then we headed down to his car and drove in to see Dr. Johnson, the bright woman who had the clinic in town and was the only medical resource for many miles indeed. After asking me what I was doing out of bed, she checked Bill's wrist and gave him a tetanus shot. I remember her showing him photos of classic broken wrists—they look like a fork, she said, the way they go—so as to reassure him his was ok. So that was that, except for a lovely echo sometime later when my wife was talking with his, during a visit. You know, she said, Bill thinks Bob is a great writer . Somewhat surprised, my wife answered, I didn't know Bill particularly cared for poetry. No, no, was the answer, not writer, rider . . . . You be "the great writer," Bill, because you damn well are.